Reply To: The Mill's Competition: Can it still win?

Fair enough. Your point is that the security benefits the Mill provides can be done in software, and WASM does it albeit with a ~30% performance hit.

The Mill is supposed to provide 10x perf/watt improvement over OoO superscalar CPUs according to Ivan’s guestimate in his videos. We are all waiting for that simulator and compiler to be available to see some real numbers.

If you can get 10x perf/watt and all you have to do is recompile your C code, I think that would make the Mill very attractive.

Another interesting aspect is that microkernels are slow in modern CPUs. A simple call to a driver takes 70-300 cycles, which make microkernels nonstarters. The Mill does have innovation here with their portal calls, which allow one process to call another at the cost of a simple function call. If successful, the Mill can make microkernels competitive, which can improve security significantly.